Jorge LuisRodriguez

Sculptures

Installations

Collaborations

Introduction:

Jorge Luis Rodriguez: Sculptures, Installations, and Collaborations

The Long Road

The work of Jorge Luis Rodriiguez (b. 1944, San Juan, Puerto Rico) belongs to a vast, and ever- evolving genealogy. He arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1963 and almost immediately began to incorporate elements of Minimalism and Optical Art, two of the burgeoning art movements in the city, into his early drawings and paintings. Back then, he was a two-dimensional artist. It would be another decade before he would “abandon the canvas” in favor of sculpture. By the 1970s, he began a successful stint at J. Walter Thompson, a world renowned New York City-based advertising agency. The influence of graphic art can be traced back to this experience. In 1972, however, he decided to pursue formal training and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts. His mentors there included artists such as George Trakas, Brice Marden, and Louise Bourgeois. The style and influence of each artist can be seen in early works such as The Wait. In 1976, several months prior to his graduation, Jorge Luis would participate in his first professional show as an artist. The following year he obtained his Master’s Degree in Sculpture from New York University, traveling to Venice, Italy to complete his thesis. This marked the beginning of future travels that would continue to expand an already extensive artistic vocabulary and knowledge of art history. Afterwards, Jorge Luis began to work as an arts educator, which included teaching posts at Kingsborough College and his alma mater, School of Visual Arts. Another formative experience came in 1980 when he was selected to an artist residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. There, he met fellow artist residents Charles Abramson and David Hammons. The three would continue to work together on various projects throughout the first half of the decade. Much of Jorge Luis’s early career is tied to his experiences in Harlem and SoHo. Each neighborhood played a key role in the development of a multicultural, alternative arts movement, which sought more inclusion and diversity in the mainstream world of contemporary art. Site-specific, or environmental art was also relevant to Jorge Luis’s early career. It was a movement that transcended the confines of the gallery space. Moreover, public installations, much like the public mural, brought artists and communities together. Growth, which was completed in 1985, is an example of this relationship. It was the first work to be completed as part of the New York City Percent for Art Program. Thirty-two years later, the sculpture installation still stands as a historic and enduring imprint on the landscape of Harlem. That same year, Jorge Luis produced ORISHA/ SANTOS: An Artistic Interpretation of the Seven African Powers, an ambitious and groundbreaking exhibition that explored the religious iconography of the Santeria religion well before its adoption into a more mainstream context. The work is also emblematic of the scope of his artistic process in subsequent years, which included a conscious decision to develop projects with a more prolonged gestation. A Monument to 500 Years of the Cultural Reversal of America is one such example. The project required three years in total to develop and incorporated findings from his travel to parts of Mexico, Guatemala, South America, Spain, and northern Africa, where he conducted research. The design of this massive installation, which is reminiscent of a Spanish galleon, also presented the challenge of honing all of the different techniques and materials Jorge Luis wanted to incorporate. In 2003, he retired from teaching in college and has concentrated on his art and tending to his studio. Much of the work that can be found in this book is there, alongside work-in-progress. Other work is strewn about his home. For him, they are remnants of an artistic process that is as demanding as it is inspiring. Yet much of it has never been on public view. So rather than a retrospective, they are part of a private collection, thoughtful works of art that often reflect an impressive, multidisciplinary body of work.

Jorge Luis Rodriguez: Grounded Modernism

The work of Jorge Luis Rodriguez, Puerto Rican sculptor, traverses worlds and captures their essence: the quiet dignity of ancient Egypt and classical Greece; the complexity of Africa; the hybrid energy of his native Puerto Rico and the wider Caribbean. Abstraction is grounded through a deeply felt humanism, personal ties to his cultural and ethnic roots, and a love of ancient cultures. Rodriguez’s finest works convey elegant grandeur, enclose mystery, or release immense power. They lead one to a personal threshold, to be experienced alone, where one can imagine limitlessness. Early on, Rodriguez fell in love with the elegant swoops and angles of modernist abstraction, which show up in his early graphic work at a renowned publicity agency. The following years brought rich variations of the circle form in sculpture. Sometimes the experimentation took conceptual turns, like placement in corners to complicate form; others, it showed off Rodriguez’s easy command of different media, like juxtaposing steel sculptures with beautiful prints and drawings. A notable work from 1973, Cheops, created during Rodriguez’s student years at the School of Visual Arts in New York, signaled future directions: balanced beauty and elegance of form; sophisticated surface treatment of steel, diminishing its weight through striking light effects; an iconography that honors and is inspired by ancient cultures. Rodríguez’s insatiable curiosity about history and primary cultures led him to travel the world since the mid ‘70s. Rodríguez has created some of his best work in series. One extraordinary one comprises six music boxes in wall relief form, created between 1980-81 during an Artist Residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The reliefs, like metopes of a Greek frieze, present a modernist variation of ancient classical form. They offer visual variety–differing sound hole shapes, zinging lines, rich textures, geometries in tension – within a deliberately limited square format. Beyond that, their imaginative titles allude to another ancient culture with music at its core, Africa, from which Rodríguez’s Caribbean ancestors descend. Narcissus, a notable series from 1980-84, finds the classical hero in an surprising setting to admire himself: a woman’s rococo “vanity” table. The first vanity table is delicate and graceful, vulnerable as the protagonist of the story. The mirror is missing; there is no image. The second one, slightly gothic in shape, gains in three-dimensionality and surface decoration; a complex reflection emerges in the mirror. The third vanity is jagged and cubist in inspiration, as the image acquires a frenzied, fragmented character. The fourth table dissolves all reflection in a baroque tangle of vegetation. Narcissus’ transformation returns him to nature. Serial repetition here has engendered inventiveness and beauty. Rodriguez’s grandmother in Puerto Rico probably had a vanity table, called a “coqueta” in Spanish, meaning vain. Twenty years later, Rodríguez created another vanity table in honor of Leonardo Da Vinci. Its exquisite carved and shaped woodwork is a reminder of the amazing breadth of his sculptural skills. The Artist Residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem led to a particularly productive period for Rodriguez, as well as to a friendship with another highly creative artist and soulmate, Charles Abramson. In 1985, Rodriguez and Abramson collaborated in the exhibition ORISHA/SANTOS, presented at the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art amidst a flourishing Soho art scene. At a time when collaborative art making was rare, and installation was a nascent art, they crossed new boundaries in a pioneering exploration of the hybrid nature of Afro-Caribbean belief systems, a theme little explored then. The exhibition offered a layered, living installation, setting Rodriguez’s beautiful sculptures representing Catholic saints in the context of Abramson’s Yoruba altars, with their live offerings of fruit, flowers, and other organic substances pleasing to the Deities. Visitors crossed thresholds between the sacred and the secular, the spiritual and the sensuous, in a vital experience of beauty, wonder, and respect. Since 1985, Rodriguez has created three sculptural projects of monumental proportions. Their creative power amazes by virtue of their ambition, their immense scale, and the aspirational values they represent.

Growth was a commission from the Percent for Art Program of the City of New York, the first such honor awarded to an artist of Latino origin. The graceful rising form—sprouting seed, bird on the wing, indomitable spirit, persevering evolution—continues to be an inspiring symbol of hope in the community of El Barrio, heart of the Puerto Rican migration to New York City. To mark the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas, Rodriguez created an anti-monument entitled A Monument to 500 Years of the Cultural Reversal of America. The immense work reconstructed a Spanish galleon carrying slaves to the new world, reproduced with exactitude from extensive research into period drawings and documents. As the year 2000 approached, Rodriguez’s huge Atlas of the Third Millennium, proved an equally moving, conflicted piece, full of foreboding for the future of humanity. Just as the slave ship brought into relief the violence and injustice at the core of the European conquest of the Americas, the all-too-human figure of Atlas is not triumphant, but overwhelmed by its millennial burden. Jorge Luis Rodriguez returned to the Czech Republic of Prague for a residency during 1995, and three works from that sojourn, interacting with works and objects found on site, capture the abstract symbolism that gives his works universal meaning. Encounter suggests humans approaching each other cautiously, trying to overcome obstacles between them. A found sculptural fragment of an embracing couple in an abandoned fountain became the moving source of Healing. Angel’s Gateachieves the final redemption.